One of the joys of pilgrimage if, like me, you are not a meticulous planner, is that you are always stumbling across fantastic places that you have never heard of and know nothing about. When I walked the 1,100 miles from Arles to Santiago de Compostela in 2012, there were dozens of occasions when I came across a Church on the route and thought, ‘This place should be famous.’ Frequently, it would transpire that it was, and that I was just ignorant!Read more

Seating plans can be a headache. We had one recently for our Doorkeepers’ Dinner. The trouble with seating plans is that if there is a logic underlying the arrangement of people, inevitably someone will feel overlooked whereas others who may have been preferred can feel embarrassed about the honour they have received to the exclusion of someone else. It usually ends in some sense of awkwardness. Incidentally, about six months ago I was at a friend’s birthday where a table plan was displayed with nice little name cards. My friend proudly announced that had placed people randomly, which seemed to me to defeat the point. I suspect that where he sat was not entirely random. Anyway, the point is that it matters to us as social creatures where we sit, and it was no different in Jesus’s day.Read more

If you were told of someone, aged twenty-five, twice-widowed, who had lost all seven of her children before their teenage years, you wouldn’t begrudge them seeking to hold on to what little they still had left. But holiness often confounds our expectations, and Blessed Mary Mancini’s life (1355-1431) is a case in point.

At the Last Supper, Jesus lifted up his eyes to heaven and prayed, saying: “I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.” These words of Jesus in today’s Gospel present a threefold puzzle to the modern world. Read more

Not far from where I grew up in Kent, the 'garden of England', there is a lovely little church dedicated to All Saints. When I led the Dominican Way walking pilgrimages in 2014-15 from Arundel to Canterbury, I made sure our route took us past this church at Tudeley. I didn't tell the pilgrims much about it in advance; I just let them discover this gem for themselves.Read more

The title of Laura Smoller’s book “The Saint and the Chopped-up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Europe” is perhaps designed to grab attention. Saint Vincent Ferrer (b.1350, d. 1419) was a Dominican friar, and is Patron Saint of builders, plumbers and construction workers. Saint Vincent is said to have traveled across Europe and was supposedly able to speak in tongues, with those in different countries able to understand him.Read more

On this day in 1535 there died at Tyburn three Carthusian monks, the
first of many martyrs of the English
reformation. Of these men and women martyred for the Catholic faith
from 1535 to 1680, 42 have been canonised and a further 242 declared
blessed, but the number of those who died on the scaffold, perished
in prison, or suffered harsh persecution for their faith in the
course of a century and a half cannot now be reckoned. One Dominican
friar, Robert Nutter, is counted among the martyrs declared blessed.
Read more

This is the first post in a new series in which the Student Brothers will write about “Interesting Churches”. The title is deliberately broad in scope so as to allow for variety between the posts. A church might be interesting because of its place in history, its architecture or interior, or because of a special significance it has to a particular brother. I think that the church I have chosen to write about, St. Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster, has all of these qualities. Read more